Export Animations from Blender to Unreal Engine 5

Overview

In this tutorial you'll learn how to export a simple rigged/animated graphic symbol from Blender to Unreal Engine 5.

At a high level, this involves:

  • Preparing your animations in Blender for export

  • Choosing the correct export settings and exporting to FBX

  • Importing to UE5 with the correct settings

This tutorial assumes basic Blender knowledge and that you lot already accept an blithe model.

Preparing Your Blender Model

General Prep

  • Brand certain your top level object is Non called "Armature". If you leave the name every bit "Armature", you will get the error message: "Multiple roots are found in the bone hierarchy. We only back up single root bone."

    • Tip: Double click to rename

  • Gear up the framerate to 30 FPS (if y'all had another FPS, the duration of your animations may demand aligning besides)

  • Set up the unit scale of your scene to 0.01 (Unreal Engine's default scale is centimeters)

  • Make certain you apply transforms to your mesh and armature so that your Scale is (1, 1, 1) and Rotation (0, 0, 0). Object > Utilize > All Transforms

Actions

  • Make sure your mesh has an armature with at least one animation.

  • Animations show up as "Deportment" in Blender and you tin can view your list of actions from the Dope Sail > Activeness Editor window.

  • Click on the dropdown card to see your list. If yous want to rename them, yous tin modify the text hither.

  • These deportment volition be exported in the FBX model and will come into Unreal equally separate animation sequences.

Exporting from Blender

Now we're going to export our mesh and animations from Blender so that they work in Unreal Engine five.

This method will export your mesh also equally all Actions.

  • Select the armature and child object(s) that are animated by information technology.

  • From the carte, click: File > Export > FBX (.fbx)

  • Modify the following export settings:

    • Limit to Selected Objects [CHECKED]

    • Object Types: Armature + Mesh

    • Geometry > Smoothing: Confront (fixes the "No smoothing grouping data was found in this FBX scene." mistake)

    • Armature > Add Leaf Bones [UNCHECKED]

    • Broil Blitheness > NLA Strips [UNCHECKED] (merely needed if you lot created NLA strips)

  • Choose a filename and export (if following Unreal naming conventions, prefix your filename with SK_, due east.g. "SK_MyCharacter.fbx")

Importing to Unreal Engine five

  • Open the Content Browser (or expand the Content Drawer)

  • Create and/or navigate to the binder where you want to import your assets

  • Click the Import push

  • Find the FBX file you just exported and click the Open button

  • Choose the following FBX Import Options:

    • Skeleton: None

    • Skeletal Mesh [CHECKED]

    • Import Mesh [CHECKED] (you can leave this unchecked if yous already have a mesh in your project and but want to add more animations)

    • Import Animations [CHECKED]

You lot should at present see a collection of avails in your content folder: a Skeletal Mesh, a Skeleton, a Physics Asset, and ane or more Blitheness Sequences. This grapheme isn't exactly my best piece of work. 😂